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posted by mrpg on Thursday August 02 2018, @05:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the MS-DaaS dept.

Computerworld:

[...] Microsoft is getting ready to replace Windows 10 with the Microsoft Managed Desktop. This will be a "desktop-as-a-service" (DaaS) offering. Instead of owning Windows, you'll "rent" it by the month.

DaaS for Windows isn't new. Citrix and VMware have made a living from it for years. Microsoft has offered Remote Desktop Services, formerly Terminal Services, for ages.

Microsoft Managed Desktop is a new take. It avoids the latency problem of the older Windows DaaS offerings by keeping the bulk of the operating system on your PC.

But you'll no longer be in charge of your Windows PC. Instead, it will be automatically provisioned and patched for you by Microsoft. Maybe you'll be OK with that.

ZDNet:

January 14, 2020 is the last day Microsoft will provide security updates for Windows 7. According to Microsoft's estimates, there are 184 million commercial devices out there (as of April 2018 and excluding China) still on Windows 7. And 64 percent of those devices are more than five years old.

For Microsoft's reseller partners, that's a huge potential opportunity, as they heard repeatedly during Microsoft's Inspire partner show last week. Traditionally, end of Microsoft support for an operating system means more chances for partners to sell customers on migration, provisioning and other services.

At the same time, the way business customers are purchasing PCs is changing. By 2020 -- the same time Windows 7 hits end of support -- 30 percent of all PCs will be acquired via DaaS, or device-as-a-service, plans, Microsoft officials told partners last week.

[...] During the Inspire show, Microsoft execs worked to hammer home the idea that resellers shouldn't simply be selling Windows 7 users a new device running Windows 10. Instead, they should take the DaaS approach and set up a whole platform to lease new Windows 10 PCs to customers.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 02 2018, @11:59AM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 02 2018, @11:59AM (#716153)

    A follow-up question for you.

    I've been running a virtualized Windows-7 for a couple of years now, but have recently upgraded hardware. The Windows 7 VM I have won't run on the upgraded hardware, so I'm also having to maintain the old hardware. Do you have any suggestions as to what to do when the older hardware (inevitably) dies?

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 02 2018, @01:38PM (2 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 02 2018, @01:38PM (#716200)

    running a virtualized

    There's many options for virtual hosting, vmware/esxi kvm openstack etc

    Do you have any suggestions as to what to do when the older hardware (inevitably) dies?

    You're not running vmware, I take it? That stuff just works. You may not like the price of course.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 02 2018, @05:09PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 02 2018, @05:09PM (#716337)

      Actually, I am running VMware. Windows has enough smarts to figure out that I've moved the virtual machine image to new hardware even though I installed the same version of VMware. Don't know how it does it, just that it does.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 02 2018, @07:33PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 02 2018, @07:33PM (#716408)

        The virtual machine isn't configured the same way. It might be as trying a new install, rather than a clone. But I suspect that the OS is smart enough to actually dig deeper. You need to configure the BIOS info, such as DMI BIOS information (type 0), DMI system information (type 1), DMI board information (type 2), DMI system enclosure or chassis (type 3), DMI processor information (type 4). Worst case, you have to make sure all the hardware reported is identical.

  • (Score: 2) by drussell on Thursday August 02 2018, @03:03PM (2 children)

    by drussell (2678) on Thursday August 02 2018, @03:03PM (#716258) Journal

    The Windows 7 VM I have won't run on the upgraded hardware

    Uhhh... Then you're not really virtualizing your install in to a non-hardware-dependent VM, now are you?

    That kinda defeats a big chunk of the whole purpose, doesn't it?

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 02 2018, @03:38PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 02 2018, @03:38PM (#716296)

      vmware reports itself via bios as "vmware". vmware also reports CPU type and stuff.
      winblows 7 checks this and other stuff.
      there's a way to "modify" winblows7 install so that it becomes virtual machine type agnostic and can be moved around regardless...
      else the backroom dealing between m$ and virtual machine makers would have been for 'nough ; )

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @06:08AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @06:08AM (#716569)

      Uhhh... Then you're not really virtualizing your install in to a non-hardware-dependent VM, now are you?

      You say that as if they somehow deliberately chose to do so, I'll bet it was a weird snafu with the VM software, as I had similar issues as described once with a VM running on Virtualbox.

      A VM Win7 image which had been running for a couple of years without any issues on Linux, Mac and Windows hosts suddenly upped and died when I transferred it to a new machine. From the cursory debugging I tried to do at the time my understanding was that despite the VM definition/config files 'describing' the virtual hardware that the VM was originally configured to run on, there was a less than subtle change in the way the software implemented that virtual hardware as described, and the Win 7 VM choked on this change at boot.

      At the time I attributed this to the fact that the new machine was my first quad core and all the other systems that this VM had previously (and still did) run on were all dual cores (Incidentally, the versions of Virtualbox running on all these machines were the then current ones) though I've never had that confirmed as the source of this fubar, as I'd only kept the image around for the (increasingly) occasional access to a couple of windows based software 'suites' it was something I could live without, so put the whole thing in the 'life's too short' file and never pursued it any further.